Cast, director put on master class in ‘Won't Back Down'

Loosely based on real-life events, “Won't Back Down” tells the story of a single mom who teams up with a disillusioned teacher to transform a failing public school into a charter school. Apparently in some states, there is an unusual mechanism that allows parents and teachers – under certain circumstances, and after certain approvals – to take over schools and start running the show. “Won't Back Down” is about an effort to make that happen.

For sure, this is a cause movie in favor of charter schools and against the teachers unions. Still, “Won't Back Down” is reasonably fair in its approach. Paddy Chayefsky once said that whenever he figured out what he wanted to say with a screenplay, he would introduce characters who disagreed and have them make their best possible argument against his point of view. If director and co-screenwriter Daniel Barnz doesn't go quite that far, he advances the union's argument in a compelling and reasonably persuasive way.

It's just that he makes the counterargument even more compelling. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a Pittsburgh barmaid-receptionist (yes, two jobs), who, despite her upbeat demeanor, is becoming increasingly frantic about having her daughter enrolled in one of the worst schools in Pennsylvania. She has no money for a private school and can't get her daughter into a charter school. So rather than watch her daughter's life get flushed down the toilet in slow motion, she resolves to use a rare provision in the education laws to change the school.

There's something about the arrangement of Gyllenhaal's features, her loose posture and down-to-earth manner that makes it very easy to believe that she has never had a dime. Her quicksilver radiance is well-paired with the more phlegmatic energy of Viola Davis, as a teacher who has lost the joy in her work and is inspired to regain it.

“Won't Back Down” details a bureaucratic process, and yet it plays more like an intense, emotional movie about parents and children. Gyllenhaal and Davis have many strong acting moments, some jaw-dropping, but then the performances throughout are uniformly good, which also says something for Barnz. Notice Holly Hunter as a union official, how subtle, worldly and unknowable she seems in her two-person scenes with Gyllenhaal. That's good acting, but it doesn't happen in a vacuum. That's good direction, too.

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